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Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

bloomberg.com

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Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#31

Post by lordnacho »

vostok wrote: post #24
lordnacho wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think it's pretty good. I get recruiters calling me all the time, a lot of them are quoting £150-200k total comp. That's for a guy with over a decade's experience in financial coding. By contrast on StackOverflow the salaries that you can see tend to be much lower for the non-finance things.

It's not surprising that it's higher than the average job on stackoverlfow. That's about what I would expect. I'm not saying it's horrible, but it's not exactly higher than top paying tech companies.

Any idea what the tech firms pay in London? I don't have many data points for them.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#32

Post by throwaway7645 »

rb808 wrote: post #7

> Eighteen are now enrolled in the program, including Korn. GS has 34k employees. Thousands of traders and probably >10k in IT. 18 people isn't really a revolution. Devs still are second class citizens in banks - the highest earning ones switched to become traders and just do some python/R/VBA on the desk. There are a few hedge funds (Millennium, Two Sigma) where devs are nearly treated as well as traders - would be…

Jane Street is probably an exception.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#33

Post by throwaway129999 »

naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

I'm in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus.

By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank.

I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds.

Main advantages of quant shops (doesn't apply to banks) over working at Google/FB/Netflix etc:

- small company size, startup style working environment, but big corp pay (or more)

- more varied/interesting work, e.g. mix of distributed data processing, high performance numerics, or performance optimization in latency sensitive code

- compensation paid purely in cash, no stock options/RSUs

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#34

Post by rb808 »

dookahku wrote: post #18

So how does a mid-level software engineer get into trading? I do paper trading on my own for fun but I'd like to make it a career.

Depends on what you mean. If you're looking at tech trading of stocks from home, quantopian is a great place to start. wallstreetoasis forums for a traditional roles for juniors and people trying to get in.

And just remember its a shrinking area. There are lots of traditional traders that have been laid off and are looking for work.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#36

Post by rhcom2 »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective. Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happ…

Thanks for the detailed response. A lot of good stuff to Google.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#38

Post by smallnamespace »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective. Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happ…

> This, coupled with the fact that few programmers were trained in fields like stochastic calc,

Anecdotally though, I've met plenty of coders who did this to themselves by refusing to learn more about the domain or the business.

They basically silo'd themselves, then wondered why their colleagues didn't treat them as an integral part of the team when they couldn't speak the language or understand the concerns.

Taught myself enough stochastic calc to change and validate pricing models while on the job.

Coders who understand their domain well are immensely valuable, and are easily worth at least 3x, because they don't over- or under-engineer a solution, and because they can conjure up with technological solutions for problems that nobody else in the company can even conceive of.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#39

Post by ng12 »

throwaway129999 wrote: post #33
naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

I'm in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus. By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank. I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds. Main adv…

> compensation paid purely in cash, no stock options/RSUs

Hands down my favorite part of working in finance. Better salary, no bullshit.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#40

Post by aleph_naught »

throwaway129999 wrote: post #33
naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

I'm in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus. By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank. I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds. Main adv…

A few questions, if you don't mind answering:

> 400-450k

Where is that in the pay distribution? Near median? Realistically, where, comp-wise, would the average SWE plateau?

How many hours are you guys putting in a week?

What was the interview like? Did they go deep into stats/stochastic-calc/derivates-pricing/etc ?

---

I'm currently in tech, making near the low end of your range. Getting promoted to the next pay scale (Staff SWE) is a lot more difficult. I'd seriously consider jumping to fintech if 400-450 was below median.

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